Posted on 6/11/2005, 11:14:39 AM by infocats
IZMIT, Turkey, June 10 - Zeynel Erdem, a leading Turkish businessman, came to Izmit, a seaside industrial town, to give 400 of his prominent peers a message.
"Don't count on the European Union," he told the crowd after a chicken dinner in a hotel ballroom here. "Look to the U.S.; they're our real friends."
That view is spreading in Turkey, a sprawling land of 70 million people who have yearned for decades to become a part of Europe. With the European Union in political disarray after the French and Dutch rejected a European constitution, and with opposition to Turkish membership gaining ground in Europe, many Turks are beginning to wonder whether their European dreams are worth the effort. They are reassessing instead their relationship with the United States, a relationship that has suffered since the start of the Iraq war.
Turkey's stated goal is still to join the European Union, but the shift in sentiment signals a deepening ambivalence toward the vaunted vision of shared sovereignty.
Just as French and Dutch voters expressed dismay at the increasing European-level control over their lives and worried aloud about immigrants diluting their nations, many Turks are now questioning whether their country should see its future as part of Europe.
Of course, few Turks have bought into the American program for reshaping the Middle East, and relations with the United States lost their pre-eminence during the Iraq war, which Turkey opposed. Turkey's focus shifted to Europe.
But that is beginning to change. Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan's fence-mending trip to Washington this week played well here. He even won some support from Washington in ending the economic and political isolation of Turkish Cypriots.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Where were they turning when they told us to take our tanks and shove it when we asked them politiely to lend us a hand by letting us move into iraq from Turkey?
Oh yea, chumming it up with chiraq
Carolyn
OT
Are you the same Carolyn from JW? Just asking...(:-)
Turkish entry into the EU is a big issue in ordinbary voters' minds, not that of the Euro-lites in national capitals or Eurocrats in Brussels. Personally, I'm hoping an "open" debate will ensue in Europe and all the dirty tricks of the so-called 'religion of peace' be exposed.... / if wishes could be horses...
Look to the U.S.; they're our real friends."
Isn't that what they all realize in the end....
Gee, Zeynel, don't they teach kindergartners in Turkey that "to have friends, you must be a friend?" When we needed Turkey's help to get our troops to Iraq, they made a point of showing us their backside, and our guys had to spend an extra three weeks in transit. You are no friend of ours, Turkey. When the EU craters, don't come to us for any favors.
Lets practice reverse Taqiyya, let Turkey think we are their friends until an opportune time comes to really put the screws to em!!! We should do this throughout the muzzie world!!!
Politics is pragmatic and trying to settle old scores like their lack of support for the US during the war is counter productive. I am glad to see the Turks come to their senses and reorient their thinkng. We need them in that part of the world and they certainly need us.
Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, we always insist on taking the high road, often to our detriment.
Look who's come crawling back.
These are the friends who tried to extort millions from us while keeping the 4thI.D floating off their shore for critical weeks during the Iraq invasion, and then denied us passage? F*CK 'EM!
I hope so too. It would have been fine for the Turkish PM to say up front that we could not stage the 4th Infantry Division through Turkey, but they gave us permission. Based on their word, we shipped all the heavy equipment to Turkey prior to the Iraq invasion. At the last minute, they kept finding new procedural votes that need to be taken in parliament, which meant that the men and equipment we had placed in Turkey were useless during the Iraqi Division.
If the 4th Infantry Division had come from the North, the Iraqi military would have collapsed much quicker than they did and the Iraqi leadership could not have fled north. Sadam and his spawn would have been cornered in somewhere like Tikrit or Falujah, and we would have had the opportunity to drain those swamps as part of the initial military operations. The 'insurgency' would have had much less traction if we had been able to attack from both sides.
Bottom Line: Americans and Iraqis have died as a direct result of the duplicity of the current Turkish regime. No doubt they had the encouragement of the lame-duck French and German leadership. I'm not willing to forgive and forget this early. Choices have consequences. They need to replace their current islamist PM with a more traditional secular leader before I'd be willing to offer them any support.
LOL. Carolyn, ain't it amazing that our "Texas-cowboy-idiot" of a President just continues to be so "lucky" with those countries who pee-peed in his sandbox before the Iraq War?
Let's see . . .
Schroeder was reelected because of his anti-U.S. stance. How's he doing now?
Jacques ChIRAQ, the declared leader of ALL things anti-U.S., is finding crow isn't palatable regardless of how them Frenchy chefs prepare it.
Now them Turkey turncoats are crawling to Washington to beg forgiveness with their hats in their hands.
My nephew was in Iraq for most of the "heated" fighting, not to belittle one bit what our guys and gals are going through now, and him and his other soldiers all say that what Turkey did by not allowing the 4th ID to go through was allow the terrorists and murderers the time to organize like they've been able to do. He says that it cost us American lives during the initial battles . . . but he also says most of the lives we're losing now can be attributed to Turkey.
Their theory is we would've caught So-Dumb Insane in Baghdad or Tikrit early, early on instead of the mouse hole we eventually found him in and the money he spread around would've been returned to the Iraqi people instead of been used to fund all the murderers. And that the murderers wouldn't have been able to escape to the north in that tiny window of time they had because the 4th ID wasn't squeezing them in the planned vise.
I'm not an expert by any means . . . but my nephew is and I agree.
Exactly. Turkey FAILED its test of friendship with the US. Nice way to repay the country who kept them from being behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
Hey Turkey, it sure sucks letting yourself get used and abused by the likes of Chirac, and then tossed out the front door when you're no longer useful to him, huh?
Very well said. I was going to post the same thought, but I was going to phrase it more like this:
OK, Turkey. When you officially and publically dump that belly-crawling, back-stabbing, SOS Jihadi--Erdogan--and announce that it's because of his anti-American Jihadism, maybe we can start to talk about getting back to our former decent relationship. But the second you again lean away from the secularism in government given to you by the brilliant Kemal Attaturk, you're dead meat as far as we're concerned.
Yours was much nicer.
I hope this signals a new and permanent shift in Turkish thinking.
More than likely WWI would have ended in a draw (due to the influenza epidemic), no ruinous reparations would have been required of Germany, and WWII wouldn't have happened.
It's good of the Turks to reassess their American relationship. They get the whole world into deep trouble every time they drift away~!
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